Rebecca MacKinnon's postings about work, reading, and ideas from 2004-2011.

April 14, 2006

Blogging from Taiwan

If you read Chinese, click the logo to the left for info about the live webcast and IRC which will be taking place a few hours from now. I'll try to post more details in English when I have them.

I'm here thanks to the generosity of the conference's sponsors and organizer Ching Chiao. Last night we had a pre-conference dinner with Ching, heads of a couple of Taiwan's main blog-hosting services, and Gen Kanai of the Mozilla Foundation who is here from Japan.

One of the things that is clear is how undercounted the global blogosphere is. Technorati says it now tracks a bit under 30 million blogs worldwide. But people estimate 5 million or so just here in Taiwan, and in China estimates run anywhere between 10-30 million. Most blog-hosting services in China and Taiwan do not "ping" any well-known ping-servers, which means that blog-tracking services like Technorati don't know of their existence and can't easily find them. This also makes it much harder for bloggers in Taiwan and China to find each other: there's no good way to search the entire Chinese-language blogosphere because they are not "pinging" any centralized servers that would make this possible. There has been some talk of setting up some kind of Asia-focused ping server for blogs in Asia, but the problem is, doing that would be expensive and would be unlikely to have a viable business model. But until something like that happens, Asian bloggers will mainly just be talking amongst themselves in their own communities. Connecting conversations between different Asian blogospheres is much harder because people don't have the right tools to find each other.

Comments

Hello Rebecca McKinnon.
Just ran into your blog, don't even know how. But your post from Taiwan struck me, (am just across the South China Sea from where you are, in the Philippine Archipelago). The challenge of the Asian blogospheres also has to do with the fact that they are really many different, uhmm, lingospheres -- which span the spectrum of human experience, from the continental Chinese to the island universes of south east asia...in what must be the remnants of the Tower of Babel after it came crashing down. Seems like the week for conferences. In manila, thai, burmese, chinese, philppine, indonesian and malaysian bloggers are meeting too. Good luck. Bon Voyage.
DJB
Philippine Commentary

Michael I was going off what some of the local blog hosting people told me but I will check my notes - going from Chinese to English it's possible to misplace decimal points and get one's numbers of zeros wrong.